A Mesoamerican motif is fully contemporized, celebrating the chef’s take on the coastal cuisine of his childhood.

Shawn Cirkiel’s family piled into a station wagon in the ‘80s and drove from Texas to the Mexican Coast to vacation.

His memory of these trips informed both his style of cooking for CH∆VEZ and the contemporary modernism of Michael Hsu’s interior team.

After a great deal of HomeWork on the ephemera one would have seen on those road trips of his youth—and in relation to the sketches and mood boards of Hsu’s office—we chose to develop 6 glyphs in a Mesoamerican fashion, then combine them in 6 weights into complex geometric patterns that honor and reflect the textiles and pottery of those ancient cultures.

Once the brilliant Michael Yates was introduced to the project, a table of deconstructed glyphs was inevitable.